YouSaid · the spoken record

Sean Ellis

lines on the record: 119
first: 2024-09-05
most recent: 2024-09-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Started gameplay experience on the other website, then they would get a message that they now have a qualifying score. And if they register, they'll be in the drawing for the weekly cash prize. And then we could pull them into multiplayer games on the site. And so it's kind of the strategy that YouTube used to grow, but it was like two years before YouTube introduced the approach.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is a likely experience that someone's going to get a good enough taste of this product? And then I do see some companies that are like, well, the activation moment should be, they've used it a hundred times. That's going to correlate to long-term retention, but it's just not very actionable. It's so far down the user experience. So ideally, if there's a way that I could get them there in the first session, in the first day, that's great. And so it's sort of something that's value that can be experienced super early. I'll actually give you an example from the first company I worked on was a game company where I actually flipped it and basically instead of making a traditional funnel where they could play our games after they signed up, I made our games the advertisements. So basically we syndicated our games to $40,000 websites.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tend to start qualitatively. So just like when do I think they've had a good enough experience with the product to really know it? And so like in the case of La Miano, it was pretty easy. If they didn't do a remote control session, they didn't use the prod. There was no value along the way there. And so, and then at least try to see if there's a correlation to long-term retention of doing that. Causation is you need to do some experimentation to prove causation. At the very least, I want to see that correlation. But if I start with two or three ideas of what it might be and then go and study the data, that can help you focus. But again, I don't think there's like necessarily one exact right answer of what is that aha moment. There might be two or three different things. I think it's that intentionality about picking something that's experience-based and saying.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to use the service to remote control the computer you're in front of. So it's not surprising that there was so many steps where we could lose people, but we just weren't that intentional about designing each of those steps initially. And it wasn't until we kind of thought through why would we lose someone at this step and studying the data, which steps were we losing the most people at, then deeply trying to contextualize why are we losing them there, coming up with a set of tests that we want to run and then having a good way of deciding which one to test first and ultimately focusing the tests on the areas where we're losing the most people.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're two big levers on driving a conversion are increased desire, reduced friction. And so, yeah, you definitely want to increase the right desire. And so sometimes it can also just be reminding people along the way of what benefits you're going to get. In the case of log me in, it was probably the most complicated funnel I've ever seen because you couldn't even get to the aha moment while you're sitting in front of the computer. You had to actually go to a different computer”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the millions of new customers a month. And so we're being unreal. But then we were like, are there any counterexamples to that? And like, no, the Insta Messengers are downloadable and they have hundreds of millions of customers. So let's study their download and install process and see if we have any ideas that we could borrow from that. So again, some inspiration. Tried some of those things. It was a combination of just trying a bunch of different stuff that ultimately led to, I wouldn't say there was one big gain. It was a bunch of small gains.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were skeptical when especially in a demand gen channel where they hadn't sort of seen a radio or a TV advertisement from our competitor who was a premium only product, these are people who are discovering the category for the first time they were getting there. And so our next test, once we articulated what the problem was, our next test gave us a 300% improvement in the download rate, which was a, we gave them a choice, download a trial of the paid version or download the free version, put big graphical checkmark next to the free version, but when they saw we had a business model and a trial of a paid version, the free version was credible. And so that essentially made that channel work for us. So I think, again, it's that combination of qualitative research, looking at how others did it. We had this theory. Our previous company had been a game company that didn't require a download. So initially we had this theory that maybe just downloadable software can't be.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 plus tests not able to improve it. Finally, someone said, these people are registering. Why don't we just ask them why they signed up and didn't download the software? And so we don't want to do it in too kind of a creepy way. So we just said made it look like a note coming from customer service. This channel was sending 200,000 people a day. So 20,000 people were converting to registering. So we had essentially 20,000 people we could email and then 18,000 of them who didn't download. And so we just asked, hey, no, she haven't had a chance to use the product yet. It looked like it was coming from customer support. What happened? And the answer we got back and not a formal survey was, oh, I just this seemed too good to be true. I didn't believe this was free. I mentioned to you we were one of the first freemium SAS products out there. And so people.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my favorite quotes is a quote from a guy Kettering that was early 100 years ago at GM running innovation, and he says, a problem well stated is a problem half solved. And so I think a lot of it comes down to not the things you try, but how you deeply understand the problem that's preventing someone from getting using your product effectively. And so, yeah, I'll just give you one example. We had one channel kind of after we made a lot of these changes and had already driven a ton of improvement in the LogMe In onboarding, we found a demand generation channel that was really cheap and the economics looked great. But at just the download step, we had a 90% drop off rate. And so we A-B tested a bunch of different things there to try to improve that conversion rate. And then finally,”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so in three months, we improved the signup to usage rate by 1,000%. So we went from only 5% of people using the product to 50%. I went back, tried the exact same channels that previously only scaled to 10,000 dollars a month. Now they scaled to a million dollars a month with a three-month payback on marketing dollars invested. 80% of new users were coming in through word of mouth. So there was this like major inflection point by just focusing on activation.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I saw that 95% of the people signing up for LogMe in. So log me in free, at the time, free remote access for your computer. So you install software and you can control it from any other computer. So 95% of the people signing up never once did a remote control session. And so not surprisingly, then I had to get my kind of monetization off the 5% who did. That was really limiting my ability to find channels that worked. And so our creditor, our CEO with this, that I shared the data with him and he basically told the product team, we are putting a complete freeze on the product development roadmap. So every single person from product engineering, design, and then also said to me, stop trying to find new channels. The three of us on the marketing side are all going to focus on improving the sign up to usage.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And that's, and they're at highest risk of losing them at that point. They're probably a little skeptical about a promise that you put out there, but they're intrigued enough to want to use it. But until you get them to that must-have experience, until you kind of get them to that aha moment, they're at high risk of being lost. And so a lot of people focus on, well, I better get their email address or their phone number. Then you're essentially having to reacquire them at that point. So to me, if you can collapse that time to value, I gave you a couple of incredible examples of when we focused. So at Log Me In when we initially tried to grow the business, I was stuck at being able to spend, you know, I couldn't spend more than $10,000 per month profitably trying to grow the business. And then I dug into the data.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I may need to do some acquisition stuff before just to bring enough flow through, but I'm not obsessing on how scalable is this. It's just like, yeah, let's get enough people coming through that we can start to take the slack out of it. Part of it comes down to that the acquisition side is so competitive now that if you're not really efficient at converting and retaining and monetizing customers, you can't find scalable, profitable customer acquisition channels.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the acquisition pretty early on, because if I go into it and I have no idea how we'll acquire those customers, I'm not real confident I'll figure it out when I'm there. So I want to have like two or three things that seem pretty viable as ways to profitably acquire customers and knowing that once I get deep into it, I'll probably come up with one or two more. And I've got like five, one of them's likely to work, but I don't want to like just be under the pressure of having to come up with that once I come in if I don't at least see an angle from before I get involved with a company.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to do is start with activation because that was just so critical and it's easy to get lost in between, especially for an early product. The product team's so focused on the roadmap. We're two features away from not even needing marketing anymore. This thing's going to take off. And then a marketing team so focused on bringing new people in, but how do you get those new people to a great first experience kind of falls through the cracks a lot of times? a lot of focus on activation. And then engagement and referral and getting the revenue model right. And then once each of those pieces are working well, then starting to really obsess on the channel side. One thing that I'll say like when I go in and directly and involve with a company on the acquisition side, I am thinking about my hypotheses on.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many people are coming in and experiencing that product market fit experience, whatever that is. And it's not just me telling them, here's what your North Star metric should be. It's that ultimately the team needs to decide that together. And then really just diagramming, what are all of the different ways that we can grow that North Star metric? So that's where you start to actually build. I call it like a value delivery engine, but it's, you know, what is our onboarding look like? What's that aha moment, that activation? What does the engagement loop look like? Is there any referral? Trying to capture it as it is today. And then from there thinking about where are the biggest opportunities for improvement. So those high leverage opportunities. And then ultimately starting to run experiments against those opportunities. Generally, I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but generally the sequence that I...”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can go into the details on how, but build a flywheel around that must have values. So step one would be understand it. Step two for me is then figure out a metric that essentially captures units of that value being delivered. And so when I think about a North Star metric, that's what I'm thinking about is like something that reflects.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, it's about trying to get as many of the right people to that same state that we just talked about with the must-have users. So trying to get as many people to experience the product in a way where they'd be very disappointed if they could no longer use the product. And so that's not just acquisition, which is how most companies think about, you know, initially it was awareness. Then maybe the more developed way was like, oh, let's at least focus on profitable acquisition. In my experience, the hardest part is really sits inside the product team. So how do you shape that first user experience so they actually use it in the right way? And it's not so difficult that they give up and that ultimately like we understand what makes it a must have product and then what we're trying to do is build a yeah, it sounds kind of theoretical here, but”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't. I think sometimes having something that's a little divisive is almost better because it's too easy to just go completely unnoticed. And so, yeah. But I was trying to put a name on not just how I was approaching growth, but seeing Facebook obviously had a very different approach to growth than most companies. LinkedIn, Twitter. There was a handful of companies that were approaching it in the same way I had previously been approaching it. And I just thought this thing needs a name. And so sat down with a couple of friends, came up with a name and it stuck. But yeah, obviously from day one, it was pretty divisive with different groups.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most CEOs who are asking me to help their companies were saying we need help with awareness building and I'm getting introductions from top VCs and so much of I think the way people were approaching growth was sort of like textbook marketing you know marketing textbook how to how to approach it and and startups just don't have the luxury to do all of those things and so you got to be really focused on how do I acquire customers to an experience that's going to make them want to keep using this product. And so I maybe maybe I picked the wrong term in calling it growth hacking, but I think it at least opened the conversation to getting more people thinking about maybe we should be thinking about growth in a different way than it's traditionally taught in marketing courses in school.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just said it's about looking at every single thing that you're doing and scrutinizing its impact on growth in the business. And particularly, I think most marketers, when I first moved to Silicon Valley,”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just one quick interjection there is that when a coin growth hacking, I did not think of it as a bunch of one-off hacks that what I thought of it was what's more about what is the way to ultimately drive sustainable growth, but it's over time, maybe more interpreted the way you described it. But just to jump in and say that.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And then you'll see we have eventually the survey.io got closed down, but essentially the template that I typically used was then moved a PMF survey.com. And so you'll see some other questions that I have on there as well, like what would you use instead if this product were no longer available? And that's one of the interesting things is you start to see people who say they'd be somewhat disappointed. Usually they're focused on a commodity use case and they know an easy alternative to switch to. So to be a must-have, it needs to be both valuable and unique.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's the same thing. Like I said, I wasn't initially involved with Newbank, I wasn't involved with them, and that's the benefit of, you know, we wrote about it in our book in 2017. And so I think that I got it out there. But I actually teamed up with the KIS metrics team in 2000, maybe 12 and essentially published this survey on survey.io where we just made it freely available for people and a really easy template to prepare and send out. And the how-to guide on it. And it was all just free. I think KISS message is kind of using it as maybe lead gen. And for me, I just wanted a way to kind of put something out for the community. And so it's been out there for a long time. So it's not surprising that different companies have found different unique ways to use it.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the users who say they'd be somewhat disappointed, so that the nice to have users of those users who are also focused on that benefit, what do they need in the product for it then to become a must-have for them? And so they're staying true to that kind of core benefit, but they're trying to essentially take those on the fence users and moving them up. And so I think their way of approaching that addressed what my concern was, which is, are we going to kind of break it for the must-have users?”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always said, just ignore the somewhat disappointed people who say they'd be somewhat disappointed, they're telling you it's a nice to have. They're as good as gone. So just ignore those guys. But what Superhuman did was, and the reason that I'll put one piece in the middle there before I say what superhuman did, the reason that I say ignore those guys is that if you start paying attention to what you're somewhat disappointed users are telling you and then you start tweaking, onboarding, and product based on their feedback, maybe you're going to dilute it for your must-have users. And that ultimately it becomes kind of good for everyone, but not great for anyone. And so that was my fear of like trying to read too much into the users who say they'd be somewhat disappointed. But the superhuman guys actually found, I think, a good way around that where they said, okay, what is the benefit that my must-have users are focused on? And then”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one of the things that's kind of cool about almost like open sourcing this survey approach is, again, watching how Newbank has evolved their usage. But one of the other companies that I think used it in an interesting way is Superhuman. And I would say that they basically ended up probably putting a lot more momentum behind the question than it had even before. They posted something about how they did it on first-round capitals blog. What I have always said, and again, it's me coming at it from probably initially a marketing background, which is like I'm kind of taking the product as a fixed thing. And how do I actually figure out how to market and grow this product? And product changes are going to take a long time. And so what are the variables that I can control with a marketing background? So one of the things I”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think they even do it down to the feature level. So, if you think about it, how would you feel if you can no longer use this feature? Starts to give you, again, the signal, is that feature a must-have feature? And if it's not, maybe we shouldn't have it. And so, yeah, I was super excited when I saw how they were using the survey. And they were doing it before I engaged with them. Oh, wow. But they were doing it, I think.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who were saying that they'd be very disappointed without the product, then okay, let's retrench and rethink, do we really have product market here and what do we need to do to get it if we don't?”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, what I would say is, but retention cohorts don't give you any of the qualitative insights into the why. So that's why we continue to do the survey. So initially, I would say if the survey comes back and it shows whatever your target number is, if you want to be like Newbank and be a 50% or I spend a few years, two of the companies I launched, we launched in Hungary and I would say it's kind of the opposite end of the spectrum of Brazil, maybe more pessimistic than the average kind of culture. And so maybe 30% is good enough there. But that ultimately, whatever your target is that you have the signal that says, okay, we have enough value here. Let's start working on growing the business. But while you're working on growing the business, I would be paying attention to those retention cohorts. And if you're churning out all the customers who”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use a lot of different tools. I actually had a survey business that I sold to private equity years ago and there was on product. It's called Kualaroo. That's like kind of inflow survey tool. I think just like using SurveyMonkey with emailed surveys works fine. For me, it's a lot more of like. What's like pleasant for the customer to fill out and then what's going to give me something where I can work really easily with the data. So at bounce, for example, they had already Intercom in place that had just introduced surveying, but it was kind of a really crappy customer experience on, at least at that time. That's been almost a year now, or actually a little over a year. And so I'm really sensitive to like, is it a good survey experience for the consumer itself? And then, but yeah, I don't think I'm stuck to any one platform there.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I prefer kind of a more passionate customer base and work from there just because I think your biggest competition when you're really innovating is just being irrelevant. And so if you're deeply relevant to anyone, I think that gives you a much better chance of long-term success.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have we raised so much money that we have to go after a really big market and that that's not, that one's not going to be long-term, but maybe then you're like, okay, once I have traction in that market, I can start to try to appeal to some other markets. But I think that's where kind of some strategic decisions come in.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I talked about I go to a multiple choice after I initially use open-ended to open-ended questions to sort of crowdsource the different use cases. But then I try to force people in a bucket. And then I can run filters on each of those buckets. And I'll be like, oh, people who use it this way are like 60% likely to be very disappointed without the product. But people who use it this way are 35% likely to be very disappointed. But way more people use it, the 35% way. And so then having to like, you know, do you want that like intensely loyal group or the much broader group that's maybe a bit less, but almost there. I think that becomes a bit of a strategic conversation of like, you know, do we want to have a better chance of surviving going after a niche that we know we can serve well?”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be that people don't actually care about the product. And so when I find that's a really good sign that we're now down to an execution challenge.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really funny. So, so much of the stuff I kind of self learned, but I basically at one point said, I need at least 30 responses. And I just thought I just kind of randomly made up a number. And then I had people telling me, yeah, 30 is kind of the minimum that you want on stuff. Okay. And even when I first created this survey, I remember showing it to the co-founder of Slideshare. And she was like, her PhD was in survey related stuff, like cognitive psychology. But she basically said it was really about surveying. And she's like, this methodology is amazing. How'd you come up with this? And so having some of that validation around these things helped, but a lot of it was just, again, driven by my own curiosity. And also just knowing that the failure is such a likely outcome that trying to reverse engineer that failure and the number one reason for failure.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I haven't seen it really fade back down, but I've seen companies fail despite having it. And I think a lot of times then it becomes like an execution challenge once you have product market fit, not everyone's going to be a good executor. But before that, I think getting to product market fit. Obviously, there's a lot of methodology for doing it today that might make it a bit easier for people, but I still think it's fairly random and pretty dang hard. And so ultimately, like the risk factor of creating something that people care about is really difficult. So if you can get to the point where you have 40% of the people who are using it saying they'd be very disappointed and you have a reasonable sample size, let's say you got 10 people and four of them said they'd be very disappointed without it, you're still going to get something useful from those four.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially when I first moved to Silicon Valley. So first 15 years of my career were not in Silicon Valley. And so I was in Eastern Europe and then New York and then Boston. Through the six months I was there, I would ask one question multiple times a month broke kind of the early beta users into a bunch of different lists and I'd ask which best describes you I like to be among the first to try cool new technology or only try things that I think will be useful for me and over the six months it flipped from 90% being people who try things that they want to try cool new technology to six months later it was people who only are going to try something that they feel like is useful. But what's kind of cool is just because what motivates you to try something is like you're an early adopter and you want to try something cool if you're going to keep using it, it's because it's giving you some utility. And so I can still use those early adopters to help me figure out where is the value inside the product.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, and the insights I got back were really useful. And so each company I went to, I kept using the question. I'm like, this works way better than your typical satisfaction question. But initially it was more about thinking just senior management to get a more honest answer out of them.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I've always done lots of surveying, but at Zodni, I was going to ask it as use my filter as a satisfaction question. So, you know, how satisfied are you with this? I'm very satisfied. I'm somewhat satisfied. And our main customers were actually senior management. And so I thought, you know, senior management's never satisfied. I'm going to get always this like super lukewarm thing. How can I change this question to be more, you know, give me a more kind of real answer from these guys? Well, if I flip it and say, how would you feel if you could no longer use this product? I'll probably get a more honest answer back from them. And of course, they're very disappointed if they can't get what they want. And so Inita was just for the case of Zobni, but then I went to Dropbox right after Zobni and like, oh, I'll try the question.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I hadn't really thought too much on that. Again, for me. Generally, I'm like, I'm trying to just figure out is this a product that can grow? So, like, when I'm using it, I'm trying to just, you know, so if I got a 37%, am I going to be like, oh, no, this would be impossible. Or if I had a 70%, does that mean I guarantee, oh, yeah, I want to jump in and work with this company? It's more nuanced than that. Obviously, if it's a 70%, but I have no idea how I grow the business that I'm going to be stuck there. So I do think he brought up a really good point that culturally some people are going to be more optimistic or pessimistic. Interestingly, when I came up with a question, I used to just use kind of a normal satisfaction question. When I was working at Zodni, I would, I'm just like an intensely curious person.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Validate that it's a must have for those early users, then I'm thinking about, okay, how do I optimize speed to value? How do I make sure that people have the right prompts to come back and use the product at the right time? So that's kind of more of that engagement loop. How do I get my existing users to bring in more users if there's something that makes sense on that end? Even how do I optimize my revenue model? Once all of those things are working well, then I'll obsess on the customer acquisition side. But like customer acquisition is so hard that if you're not really efficient at converting and retaining and monetizing people, you're going to really struggle on the customer acquisition side.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think to me it's kind of like what really is the definition of product market fit is the definition that people who get through my crappy onboarding and actually experience the product love it. And if I'm able to retain those people, that means I have product market fit or is fixing that crappy onboarding part of getting to product market fit as well. I think that's up for debate. So to me the hardest, I wouldn't obsess on onboarding if I know those who kind of get through the challenge of getting started with the product still don't like the product then feels like it's a core product issue or wrong people using it in the wrong way issue. But once you have that, then ultimately it doesn't mean that you're ready to grow. Like when I focus on growth, then customer acquisitions almost the last step. Like once I”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one off products would probably, you know, like, how would you feel if you could no longer watch the movie you just watched? I wouldn't care. Even like when I run a workshop, I don't run this as part of my survey after I do a workshop because how would you feel that you can no longer attend the workshop you just attended? It doesn't make sense. So I'll ask an NPS question as my filtering question so that I'm looking at focusing and on feedback of people who love it. Also then through a separate lens looking at people maybe who would be my detractors. So I think one-off products are probably not good products to run the question on. There may be other places as well that I'm not thinking of right now, but it sounds like not.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not people who've seen like a demo of your product, but it's people who actually have experienced the product. But it's okay if you're hitting people who've used it months later. But like in that lookout example that I gave, if I'm testing people's perception of the product after I made updates to the onboarding, I'm going to only want to survey people who went through the new onboarding.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I recommend is a random sample of people who've really used your product. So they've gone in, they didn't just sign up, but they went in and hopefully hit that activation moment. They've used it twice, you know, two plus times, and they've ideally used it, say, within the last week or two weeks.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The product was important and speed to value and kind of all of the other things I think about in Go to Market for an early stage product still were relevant, but just the, I think they were a little stronger on the percentage, you'd be very disappointed. Even Eventbrite when I was there, when we ran it was probably the second highest I'd ever seen. But with Event organizers, if they've already set their event up on that platform and they've sent it out to their list and all those people are coming in and they're managing their event, again, they've invested a lot in the platform. So sort of switching costs, I think, can factor in there. So it's a function of both switching costs and utility of the product.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, how could that be possible? This product is kind of a commoditized category. I wouldn't even say it's one of the best. And then when I want to dug into it, again, it comes back to that Muriel hooked model is that the investment people have made in building that website, they put so much into, you know, that they know exactly how to make the changes and the kind of the CMS kind of side of things. have spent a lot of time just making it beautiful. And so ultimately it was something that was why they were saying they'd be very disappointed. But for kind of fast forward and when I initially went in, still doing these things helped the business resume growth and have significant growth over the next 12 months after we did these things. So still the signal we got from why people would be very disappointed without.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their growth engine, and I ran the survey thinking, you know, you've had products like Wix and Weebly that have come onto the market since this more legacy website building product has been around. And I personally think they're a little easier to use. They're a little better. And so I didn't have high hopes when I ran the survey, but it came back with one of the highest scores I'd ever seen. And it was like 90% of the people saying they'd be very disappointed if they could no longer miss the product.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're having people say that they'd be very disappointed without your product, that's a really good sign. What I can tell you is that not just not necessarily a false positive, but what is driving people to say they'd be very disappointed. One of my favorite books is Hooked by Near Yal. And he talks about in the kind of engagement loop that your last step is investment. And so I ran the survey on a business that I thought was a fairly commoditized business. And I wanted part of it I wanted to see, could I use the same go-to-market approach on a later stage company and use it to accelerate growth? And so this was a business called Webs.com. And they eventually got acquired by Vistaprint. But they'd been pretty flat for the year before I went in there. And then I started to kind of use this approach to dial in.”
2024-09-05 · Lenny's Podcast · The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source